How to get controls in WPF to fill available space

Question

Some WPF controls  like the Button  seem to happily consume all the available space in its  container if you don t specify the height it is to have   And some  like the ones I need to use right now  the  multiline  TextBox and the ListBox seem more worried about just taking the space necessary to fit their contents  and no more    If you put these guys in a cell in a UniformGrid  they will expand to fit the available space  However  UniformGrid instances are not right for all situations  What if you have a grid with some rows set to a   height to divide the height between itself and other   rows  What if you have a StackPanel and you have a Label  a List and a Button  how can you get the list to take up all the space not eaten by the label and the button   I would think this would really be a basic layout requirement  but I can t figure out how to get them to fill the space that they could  putting them in a DockPanel and setting it to fill also doesn t work  it seems  since the DockPanel only takes up the space needed by its  subcontrols    A resizable GUI would be quite horrible if you had to play with Height  Width  MinHeight  MinWidth etc    Can you bind your Height and Width properties to the grid cell you occupy  Or is there another way to do this

User · Accepted Answer

Each control deriving from Panel implements distinct layout logic performed in Measure   and Arrange      Measure   determines the size of the panel and each of its children Arrange   determines the rectangle where each control renders   The last child of the DockPanel fills the remaining space   You can disable this behavior by setting the LastChild property to false   The StackPanel asks each child for its desired size and then stacks them   The stack panel calls Measure   on each child  with an available size of Infinity and then uses the child s desired size    A Grid occupies all available space  however  it will set each child to their desired size and then center them in the cell   You can implement your own layout logic by deriving from Panel and then overriding MeasureOverride   and ArrangeOverride     See this article for a simple example

User · Answer

There are also some properties you can set to force a control to fill its available space when it would otherwise not do so  For example  you can say   HorizontalContentAlignment  Stretch        to force the contents of a control to stretch horizontally  Or you can say   HorizontalAlignment  Stretch        to force the control itself to stretch horizontally to fill its parent

User · Answer

Well  I figured it out myself  right after posting  which is the most embarassing way      It seems every member of a StackPanel will simply fill its minimum requested size   In the DockPanel  I had docked things in the wrong order  If the TextBox or ListBox is the only docked item without an alignment  or if they are the last added  they WILL fill the remaining space as wanted   I would love to see a more elegant method of handling this  but it will do

User · Answer

Use the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment layout properties  They control how an element uses the space it has inside its parent when more room is available than it required by the element   The width of a StackPanel  for example  will be as wide as the widest element it contains  So  all narrower elements have a bit of excess space  The alignment properties control what the child element does with the extra space   The default value for both properties is Stretch  so the child element is stretched to fill all available space  Additional options include Left  Center and Right for HorizontalAlignment and Top  Center and Bottom for VerticalAlignment

[wpf] How to get controls in WPF to fill available space?

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